random thoughts about mothering grown-ups

Archive for October, 2010

Nearly three months have passed since my last post, in which I mused about whether my daughters really minded having me write about them, even on a barely-noticed, anonymous blog. A couple of Momma Loshen’s few readers wrote to ask whether I had decided to stop the blog altogether. In a way, I had. If it came down to a choice between my daughters and my little blog, or even my career as a writer, there was no contest, the girls would win.

But is that really what it comes down to? Have Meta and Nutmeg even noticed that I’m not writing here anymore? For that matter, had they noticed that I was writing here in the first place? Meta had, I think, since she postsed comments occasionally, but Nutmeg seemed basically uninterested in the whole enterprise. Now, however, Nutmeg and I are thinking of entering into a joint book-writing project (Meta wanted no part of it, though I would have loved to have her help). If the stars align — if the publishing gods come through with a decent advance — Nutmeg and I are going to have to figure out how to mix personal revelations with plain old-fashioned journalism. So maybe I should go back to practicing some of that here.

I’ve also wondered, on and off over these past three months, whether my ideas about privacy and decorum are positively archaic. Has the notion of self-scrutiny and confessional totally changed in the Wide World of Web 2.0.? When I see what people, including Meta and Nutmeg, are willing to reveal about themselves online, I realize how outmoded my thinking seems to be. Maybe I don’t really want to be left out of all the chatter — I had been having a good time nurturing this blog, and I’ve missed it.

I realize that, in some ways, blogging is so last-year, almost as out of date as the legacy-media magazines I ordinarily write for. If I want to really understand how people are using the Web, what I have to figure out isn’t blogging, it’s microblogging. Eh. Maybe later; at the moment Twitter is beyond me. But I’m going to take another stab at Momma Loshen. In doing so, I hope I can stake out a balance between being honest about myself and my relationship with my grown daughters, and being sensitive to my daughters’ right to their own stories, without my intrusive filter. I’m going to walk this tightrope one more time, because it was kind of fun while it lasted, and we three are all adults now. We should be able to figure out how to make this work.